Article by Thomas R. Karl, Stephen C. Diggs, Franklin Nutter, Kevin Reed, and Terence Thompson: “From farming and engineering to emergency management and insurance, many industries critical to daily life rely on Earth system and related socioeconomic datasets. NOAA has linked its data, information, and services to trillions of dollars in economic activity each year, and roughly three quarters of U.S. Fortune 100 companies use NASA Earth data, according to the space agency.
Such data are collected in droves every day by an array of satellites, aircraft, and surface and subsurface instruments. But for many applications, not just any data will do.
Leaving reference quality datasets (RQDs) to languish, or losing them altogether, would represent a dramatic shift in the country’s approach to managing environmental risk.
Trusted, long-standing datasets known as reference quality datasets (RQDs) form the foundation of hazard prediction and planning and are used in designing safety standards, planning agricultural operations, and performing insurance and financial risk assessments, among many other applications. They are also used to validate weather and climate models, calibrate data from other observations that are of less than reference quality, and ground-truth hazard projections. Without RQDs, risk assessments grow more uncertain, emergency planning and design standards can falter, and potential harm to people, property, and economies becomes harder to avoid.
Yet some well-established, federally supported RQDs in the United States are now slated to be, or already have been, decommissioned, or they are no longer being updated or maintained because of cuts to funding and expert staff. Leaving these datasets to languish, or losing them altogether, would represent a dramatic—and potentially very costly—shift in the country’s approach to managing environmental risk…(More)”.
